Arabesk (68 page)

“Unfortunately,” said Raf as he put down his coffee cup and leant back, “he also died…”

“He died?” So intent was the small woman that she almost fell off the sofa from bending too far forward.

“Sad, isn’t it?” said Raf. “I can, however, tell you that he was German.” Raf flicked open a leather notebook and hit resume, watching as words scrolled up the page. Yet another message from Hani by the look of it and two missed calls from Zara.

“We’ll be releasing his name later…” Raf flicked shut the notebook and put it back on the table.

“Advance notification of which,” Senator Liz began to say, “would be very…”

“
Useful
. Yes,” said Raf, “I’m sure it would.” Whatever froideur might be about to fall ended as double doors crashed open and Khartoum staggered in, carrying a heavy silver tray.

Double loops of gold tied themselves in knots up the front of his frock coat. A cravat of yellowing Maltese lace frothed from his neck. And beneath the large silver buckles of his shiny shoes, grey showed against black, where Khartoum had missed patches of dust on their freshly cleaned patent leather.

“Fresh coffee, Your Excellency.”

Raf took one look at the old man’s face and swallowed his smile. If Khartoum was dressed like that, then there was a reason. Just as there had to be a reason for the parable Khartoum had told Raf before the meeting began. It had begun by Khartoum asking him if he’d read any of Hani’s stories.

The answer to that had been
no
… Although he’d had some read to him.

“Good.” Khartoum smiled. “Here’s another. A thief creeps into the enclosure of a Sufi master and finds nothing there but sand and dry crusts. As he leaves, understanding his disappointment, the Sufi tosses the thief the tattered blanket from his bed, so that he should not go back into the street empty-handed.”

“That’s one of Hani’s tales?”

“No,” the old man had said. “Not yet…”

Raf watched in fascination as the old man lowered his heavy tray carefully onto the table. A small gilt jug was accompanied by two tiny gilt cups, a Limoges platter of rosewater Turkish delight, dusted with sugar, and a smaller plate, piled high with tiny crescents of pastry. An open cigarette box, made from beaten silver but lined with rosewood, was filled with Balkan cigarillos.

“I trust Your Excellency needs nothing.” Khartoum gave the tiniest bow and walked backward from the chamber, as if he’d been a majordomo all his life.

Coffee, tiny croissants, Turkish delight… Limoges dishes
and an
English silver tray
… Somewhere in there, sure as mathematical certainty, was an answer to their sum. Concentrate, the fox would have said. So Raf did, starting with the
nothing
that Khartoum considered he needed.

Zero had been an Arabic understanding. The
nasrani
who came with their heavy mail and what passed for cooking grasped the numerical concept of
something
plus
something,
but zero, the addition, subtraction and definition of
nothing,
had to be explained.

The French, the English, the Germans, now the Americans. And before that the Mamelukes and the Arab invaders. He had it! What Khartoum was saying was, given the chance, Isk would again re-create itself. No one ever truly conquered this city… They either passed through or were adopted by the city they thought had fallen to them.

“What do you want from us?” Raf demanded.

“Us?”

“With the city, with me…”

He faced her across a low table and both of them understood that they’d finally arrived at the real reason why they were there.

“Iskandryia…” said the Senator.

“Is in chaos.” Raf shrugged. “We’ve had this conversation. What matters is… Why are you here?”

“To offer help.” The Senator sat back, forcing herself to relax. Unfortunately, Raf saw her do it. Which just made her stressed again.

“Help?” Right, thought Raf. Obvious really. “And in return?”

For a second it looked as if Senator Liz was about to say,
there is no “in return.”
But something in Raf’s smile stopped her. “The situation is tricky.” She began again…

Your carpet is moth-eaten, hardly worth buying, the quality is poor, besides it is too small, too expensive and I don’t need a carpet anyway
… Raf had heard it often, that opening position in every negotiation. The one that said,
out of the goodness of my heart I’m going to agree to rob you blind
.

Tuning out the low drone of the Senator’s explanation, Raf traced the Doppler spore of a cherry top as it raced down Fuad Premier, passed through Shallalat Gardens and vanished along Avenue Horreya. Orders had gone out that afternoon locking down the city. Leave had been cancelled across all divisions of the police, even the
morales
… The military were on standby, confined to barracks but ready. His Sudanese guard patrolled the streets around the mansion.

Raf could imagine tomorrow’s headlines.

“…does that sound acceptable?”

Yanking his attention back to the chamber, Raf smiled at the American woman seated opposite. “Run through that last part again,” he said. “I think I might have missed something…”

Unsweetened by its sugar coating the pill was bitter. On behalf of PaxForce—read Washington, Berlin and Paris—Senator Liz demanded the right to station armed observers within the city to keep the peace. But there was worse, infinitely worse. And finally Raf understood why Hamzah had been desperate to see his daughter safely married, so desperate that he’d been prepared to bribe Lady Nafisa to achieve it.

“We have evidence,” the Senator was saying. Flipping open her old-fashioned file, she pulled out a stack of 10×4s, all of them copyrighted to “Jean René” and dated decades earlier.

The photographs might have been arranged in chronological order, or by level of atrocity, or maybe the order was as random as the place names printed on the back and war really was God’s way of teaching geography.

Mostly the dead were children, some almost old enough to count as adults, if that threshold was sufficiently flexible. They varied in race, skin colour, age and sex. And the only thing they had in common besides a gaping cross cut into each chest was the bareness of their feet and the raggedness of ripped uniforms… Inasmuch as T-shirts and cargo pants could count as uniform. Most of the dead also wore amulets, small leather bags, metal charms and badges, lots and lots of badges.

Cheap and plastic, black on red. The eyes of a saint above the beard of a prophet.

“Colonel Abad,” Senator Liz said redundantly.

Raf already knew that. He’d had a tri-D of the man on his study wall at school. Between the plastic badges, dark poppies blossomed against dark skin, wounds from the bullets those amulets were meant to stop. Flies hovered frozen around faces that stared blindly into a sky that time had long since left behind.

“Hamzah was involved in this?” Raf’s question was hesitant. As if he couldn’t quite believe his own suspicion, but the crosses that disfigured each corpse were unmistakable.

“No,” said Senator Liz, “this was done by Ras Michael’s Church Militant. Those responsible were tried and executed or jailed. These are Hamzah’s responsibility…” She took the remaining photographs from Raf and discarded the top third, handing back the rest.

They were no less ugly. Children still lay faceup to the sky, their feather-and-bone amulets as impotent as the combat patches tacked to their shirts.
God Rules,
read one T-shirt. Below the slogan someone had sewn a star, cut from red cloth.

“Don’t tell me,” said Raf, reaching for the original photographs. “This is one side.” He flipped over a photograph. “And this is the other…” Side by side on the table, a dead girl and a ripped-open boy stared back at him.

Senator Liz nodded.

“So why go for Hamzah rather than Colonel Abad?”

“Because we know where Hamzah is. Anyway,” she said, “our best intelligence suggests Abad’s already dead.”

“Already…” Raf tossed down his photographs. “If you’ll excuse me.” He didn’t wait for her answer, just stood up and strode out of the chamber. On his way through the door, he flicked off the lights. Maybe she’d learn something about the nature of darkness.

Raf had an office full of researchers back at Third Circle, an Intelligence Department based out of the barracks at Ras el-Tin and a dozen detectives, one or two of whom might even be able to do their job; but he found the information he needed in the kitchens, holding a skillet in one hand and a wooden spatula in his other. Flames roared from a gas ring as the gaunt man shuffled coffee beans backward and forward, like a skeleton mixing concrete.

“There was a war,” said Raf. “When Hamzah Effendi was a child.”

“Before
you
were born?” Khartoum sounded amused by his own question. “Yes, there were many wars. All unnecessary. What of it?”

What indeed?

“Who was in the right?” The question sounded stupid even as Raf asked it; but sometimes questions need to be asked, even stupid ones. And he knew the Sufi’s answer would be honest, no matter that the old man was partisan.

“No one was in the right,” said Khartoum.

“Then who was in the wrong?”

“No one.” Dark eyes regarded Raf, as piercing as those of a hawk. “They were children,” said Khartoum. “Not men, not women… You should ask who armed them. Who had an interest in seeing them fight? Or maybe this is a question you too think best left unasked…”

22nd October

“Hey you…” Hani grabbed Ifritah by the scruff of the
neck and pulled so that the cat’s head yanked back and its purr stopped as rapidly as if somebody had flicked a switch. “That’s better,” the girl whispered, hugging the cat to her chest. Immediately the scraggy animal started to purr again.

Hani sighed.

One of her arms ached from cuddling Ifritah, her foot had pins and needles and the narrowness of the window ledge on which she perched had sent her behind to sleep. The long velvet curtain she hid behind was both old and dusty, so half the time Hani had to hold the bridge of her nose just to concentrate on not sneezing because sneezing would ruin everything. Besides, as it was, her own breathing was almost too loud to let her hear what was being said by the cross American woman.

It should have been easy. But something in one of the woman’s pockets was interfering with the tiny microphone Hani had stuck to the bottom of the table. Or maybe the microphone was broken. After all, it came from a Tina Tears whose head she’d cracked open with a paperweight when the plastic proved too tough to cut using a kitchen knife.

Hani knew she shouldn’t be there. Just as she knew she was in trouble if Ashraf found out. And he probably didn’t even want her help. She was a child, as everybody from Zara to Khartoum kept telling her. But she also had an IQ of 160 for real, could do crosswords in French, English and Arabic and had forgotten more about computers than Raf knew, even if she couldn’t see in the dark.

Hani wasn’t meant to know about his night vision or maybe she was meant to have forgotten—but she did know. She knew other things too, dark swirling facts that waited at the edges of her mind, wanting to come to her if only she’d let them.

On the other side of the curtain, the small woman was arguing again. She’d been angry since Raf came back to finish their conversation, only this was worse. She wanted Raf to give up Effendi, that was how she put it… Effendi had to be given up, like cigarettes.

Ashraf refused, of course, and Hani hoped he’d go on refusing. She liked Zara, and Effendi was Zara’s father. Hani didn’t like Zara’s mother, but then Zara didn’t like Zara’s mother so the Senator could have her if she wanted.

“I’ll leave the photographs,” the woman said crossly, climbing to her feet. Hani knew that was what she was doing by the creak of a sofa. Footsteps padded across carpet, then stopped. The Senator was turning in the doorway, wanting to say something. Only the threat or retort never came. Instead the woman and her interpreter let themselves out of the governor’s chambers.

That was bad. Khartoum should have been there to let her out. Hani knew this from living with her Aunt Nafisa, notables never opened their own doors. A creak from the other sofa told her that Raf was leaving. After the creak and steps came the slam of a door and then nothing.

“You can go now,” said Hani, yanking open her nearest window to release the struggling cat. With Ifritah gone the room became more silent still. So Hani padded across the silence and picked up one of the famous photographs. The gutted boy was little older than she was, though his skin was darker and his black hair scraped back into a fat ponytail. The two girls in the next photograph were about Hani’s age. One of them was missing her hands.

Looking down, it wasn’t the boy’s face that gripped Hani’s attention but that of the bearded man on the badge pinned to his dirty shirt. Except for a beret and a small cigar clamped between his teeth, the man could have been the
nasrani
God, the one who got himself killed.

“Abad,” Hani said to herself and picked up the photograph, tucking it down the side of her jeans and smoothing her T-shirt back into place. No one stopped her as she left the chamber or saw her in the corridor outside. All the same, as Raf sometimes said, better safe than sorry when being sorry wasn’t an option.

The girl blanked her screen. “It’s nothing,” she said hurriedly.

Raf glanced from Hani’s face to the photograph she was trying to slide into an open drawer. She had it turned upside down, but he could still see some of the caption.
Kordofan, 30th March. Investigators…

Inside his head Raf swore.

“You got that from downstairs?”

Hani nodded. “I’m sorry.” There was a haunted look on her face and she’d chewed one corner of her lip until it was raw. What upset Raf most was the way she leant away from him, hunching her shoulders without realizing it, in preparation for the slap that would never come.

“No,” said Raf, stepping back. “My fault. I apologize…”

“Why?” the small girl asked suspiciously.